GSK chief Em­ma Walm­s­ley saw a slight pay raise amid what she called a “land­mark year” for the com­pa­ny, in­clud­ing the spin­out of its con­sumer health unit Ha­le­on.

The CEO took home rough­ly £8.45 mil­lion in 2022 (near­ly $10.3 mil­lion), up from £8.2 mil­lion the year pri­or. That in­cludes a £37,000 salary boost and an added £868,000 in bonus mon­ey com­pared to 2021, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent re­port.

How­ev­er, her pay pack­age con­tin­ues to lag be­hind oth­er phar­ma chiefs, in­clud­ing fel­low UK-based As­traZeneca CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot, whose pay pack­age to­taled £15.3 mil­lion (more than $18.6 mil­lion) in 2022. Amer­i­can phar­ma chiefs tend to take home hefti­er pay pack­ages, such as Ab­b­Vie CEO Rick Gon­za­lez, who brought in $26.2 mil­lion.

Walm­s­ley’s earn­ings eclipsed No­var­tis CEO Vas Narasimhan’s this year, with his com­pen­sa­tion to­tal­ing rough­ly 8.4 mil­lion Swiss francs ($9 mil­lion), down from 11.2 mil­lion Swiss francs ($12 mil­lion) in 2021.

Mean­while, GSK’s for­mer R&D chief Hal Bar­ron brought home near­ly $7.2 mil­lion last year, in­clud­ing a base salary of more than $1.3 mil­lion.

Tony Wood

Un­der Tony Wood, the new head of R&D, GSK has promised to dou­ble down on vac­cines, par­tic­u­lar­ly mR­NA tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms, an RSV can­di­date for old­er adults, and a Phase III menin­gi­tis pro­gram, the com­pa­ny said on its most re­cent earn­ings call.

“More broad­ly, you know, two-thirds of our pipeline now is in in­fec­tious dis­eases and HIV,” Walm­s­ley said on the call. She not­ed that the com­pa­ny is still com­mit­ted to on­col­o­gy, though it’s a small part of the cur­rent busi­ness.

The com­pa­ny said it would al­so spend more on its PD-1 block­er Jem­per­li and oth­er ear­ly-stage im­muno-on­col­o­gy drugs, as well as ex­per­i­men­tal ther­a­pies for se­vere asth­ma and chron­ic he­pati­tis B.

“(Busi­ness de­vel­op­ment) and cap­i­tal al­lo­ca­tion will be a strong fo­cus in 2023 and be­yond,” Walsm­ley added.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.

Boehringer Ingelheim reported human pharma sales of €18.5 billion on Wednesday, led by type 2 diabetes and heart failure drug Jardiance and pulmonary fibrosis med Ofev. Jardiance sales reached €5.8 billion, growing 39% year over year, while Ofev took in €3.2 billion, notching its own 20.6% annual jump.

However, Boehringer is also looking ahead with its pipeline, estimating “In the next seven years the company expects about 20 regulatory approvals in human pharma.”